ProjectGeneral/form_renderer_functions.php is being deprecated in 9.8.x

[ChemiKyle]

Terry Smith of University of Arizona sent us an email:

Hi all

How would you recommend I get rid of this message which displays when I add the REDCap Entity API so that I can use the Project Ownership module?

It appears that a REDCap hook, plugin, or external module on this page is including/requiring a PHP file in REDCap that is no longer used as of REDCap v9.8.0 and higher (although it still exists temporarily). Please note that the files listed below will cease to be a part of the REDCap base code in releases after May 2020, after which the code on this page may fail and may cause an error. You should notify your REDCap administrator and/or the hook/plugin/module author regarding this information so that the custom PHP code may be fixed accordingly. The following files below should no longer be included/required in PHP custom code: /ProjectGeneral/form_renderer_functions.php.

Thanks
terry

The functions defined in this form are likely being migrated to classes (seen before with getBranchingFields being migrated to DataEntry). The destination classes should be preferentially chosen.

Two methods to aid in this:
Detecting if they are scoped as usual: function_exists(<function_name>)
Detecting where they moved: method_exists(<new_class>, <function_name>)

I suspect the message may appear so long as ProjectGeneral/from_renderer_functions.php is referenced.

[ChemiKyle]

I have been unable to get this message to appear, however, in REDCap versions 9.8.0-9.9.0, the contents of ProjectGeneral/form_renderer_functions.php is:

<?php
addToPhpIncludeWarningInProject(__FILE__);

This change is seen in: ProjectGeneral/form_renderer_functions.php and Surveys/survey_functions.php. Other modules referencing these files will need to be checked.

Perhaps our dev machines have some level of error suppression, because this function does nothing.

grep -rnl . -e 'ProjectGeneral/form_renderer_functions.php' in the root of the Entity and Project Ownership modules reveals it is not referenced in either module.

All project ownership pages function as expected, as do FR_COVID pages. I would guess that the functions Entity uses that used to be defined in ProjectGeneral/from_renderer_functions.php have been migrated to classes that are included in the scope in affected REDCap versions.

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While this issue is useful in the sense that that it may affect any of our modules (I see an include_once referencing form_renderer_functions.php in OnCore Client), I cannot recreate the error reported by the user. I will not close this as it's a good place to store this meta issue.